PREORDER A COPY:

In a small town where silence feels safer than truth, two teen boys share a friendship charged with a magnetic attraction neither knows how to name. As shame and age shape who they are becoming, their bond asks an unspoken question: is it enough, or will it pull them apart forever?

Mark and Brett have been inseparable since they were five, running wildly along the meandering creek that cuts through their neighborhood in the Pennsylvania countryside. Their friendship is riddled with intense closeness and complication, a dynamic that is confusing to Mark and exhilarating to the seemingly older, more sure-of-himself Brett.

Together, they spend their high school years dealing with childhood bullies, overbearing siblings, and parents, whose own lives and struggles remain a mystery until the boys are old enough to understand them.

As teenagers, Mark struggles with his attraction to other boys, while Brett thrives in his heterosexuality, or so he claims. As high school nears its end, a reckoning bubbles to the surface—one that forces the boys to confront their true feelings for one another, or go their separate ways and leave the creek and the wooded pathways they know so well behind.

Published by Knopf Books for Young Readers, Penguin Random House
352 pages | Reading Age: 14+ | Publication Date: April 13, 2027

Alexander M. Rigby is a New York Times bestselling editor at DK, an imprint of Penguin Random House. He has visited every national park in the United States and is the author of The Nature of Our National Parks. Alexander holds an MFA from Stonecoast at the University of Southern Maine. He lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania with his husband. Meet Me at the Creek is his debut novel.